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Exhausted by the seemingly endless maze of gallery booths at Art Basel, I spent most of my day off the convention grid, visiting private collections in Miami, ending my day at the Bass Museum, a ten-minute walk from the MiamiBeach Convention Center.

The Bass, which is chaired by George Lindemann Jr., son to billionaire serial entrepreneur George Lindemann Sr., is hosting Art Public, a series of structures in Collins Park, but the real treasures are inside the museum itself.

(Note: George's brother Adam owns the gallery Venus Over Manhattan in New York City, his mother, Frayda, is chairman of the Metropolitan Opera.)

A bit about the Bass: their collection is heavy on art from the Renaissance, in a city with an artistic identity that revolves almost totally around contemporary art. They also happen to house Miami's only mummy. It's a weird situation that the Bass has made the most of. Since chief curator Silvia Karman Cubiñá joined up in 2009, the museum has been exploring the idea that all work was contemporary in its own time through The Endless Renaissance, which essentially asserts the Bass's relevance to the larger Miami scene. On Wednesday, they debuted six individual solo art shows with a focus on how "works and ideas transform over time and in front of different audiences."

Those displays are carefully curated, ironic, funny and lacking in the heavy self-seriousness that can be found in spades four blocks south. Delightful and unpretentious, I found it to be a great break from the crowds and the bluster at the convention center. Disclaimer: the thesis may border on being too explicitly communicated for audiences more sophisticated than this reporter.

Highlights:

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's series of videos and photographs depicting rural Thai audiences sitting down and interpreting prominent Western artwork seen for the first time.

Hans-Peter Feldmann's collection of found objects and altered images lampoons curation and the power it has to influence social status. Within, you'll find a cross-eyed Lenin portrait, tacky nudes, and three paintings "curated" together that have no shared meaning.